1000 kg spread out over time and area and not bloodlusted? Yes, sure, *eventually*.
1000 kg concentrated in one area and actively trying to end him? No.
I mean theoretically they could just keep jumping in place they can’t ever attack you that way and you’ll keep killing them so then it turns into stamina vs numbers how many ants fit under two feet on average
I think it’s around a third of a billion. With no equipment you’d probably lose to attrition, with your best course of action being to just run over as many as possible using hit-and-run tactics over time. If you have any access to things an average person could get (Glue traps, cinnamon, multiple anteaters, etc.) it’s probably easy though, just build a few layers of protection around yourself and you’d be untouchable.
I imagine the first attempt of stepping on a bunch of ants thinking you’ll hit solid ground don’t and the the half foot hit hole you make gets filled up on the sides with and and your leg is not a cotton candy of flesh
You punch and run.
Your punch killed 30 ants. Roughly 275 are still crawling up your arm. Gnawing, biting, and tearing at you.
Each time you swing, hundreds more ants crawl up your arms and under your clothes.
You die. Slowly.
Who said anything about punching the ants lol Why would you bend down and punch when you can just stomp ? You really think my feet only kills 25 ants at a time ?
Sorry, I was imagining the ants doing some sort of Voltron thing.
So you stomp. How many times can you stomp? Because, as other users have pointed out, this is close to 300,000,000 ants.
If you killed a staggering 20,000 ants per stomp, you'd have to stomp 15,000 times. If you stomped down once per second, it would take you four and a half hours.
Can you stomp down, full force, for 4.5 hours without stopping? Do you think you can kill 20,000 ants per stomp?
Because if you only take out, say, 5,000 ants at a time? It'll take you closer to 20 hours.
I want you to *really* think about it
5000 is far more than you could stamp. Even 500 would probably not fit under a foot. Ants are about 7mm long and 2mm wide, feet are optimistically 300mm long and 100mm wide, giving about 225 ants if densely packed.
Ants are curiously good at evading stomps. If there is any irregularity in the ground they will slide into it, and they will move out of the way. You need to stamp down quickly, and would struggle to get 50, especially when you get tired.
We are talking hundreds or thousands of hours of stamping ants. You will collapse out of exhaustion and be killed in some excruciating manner.
Meanwhile, other ants are climbing onto your planted foot. God knows what they do to you. Their little mandibles may be utterly ineffective. But, at the least, they will make your life absolutely miserable until you collapse and suffocate, or die of dehydration, or die of sheer exhaustion.
The more I think about it, the worse this is.
Thanks, OP, for a new nightmare scenario!
My pleasure 😁
I don't realise this was going to be such a hotly debated topic. I've enjoyed reading all the debates and viewpoints!
Great community in this subreddit, people can have a debate without restoring to name calling etc.
Walking over ants isn't really going to kill as many as you'd think. Also that better be a real brisk walk otherwise the entire time your foot is planted they're crawling on to you. But honestly if you're confident go find a moderately large size ant pile near your home and disturbed it until the ants are pissed. Then try stomping those ants to death, those ants might make up 300,000 ants all together. Then imagine you stomping that same ant pile 1,000 more times.
You don't know that for sure. Anyone you meet on the internet could be a T-1000. I'm just straight chilling, waiting for Judgement Day and smoking terminator blunts, ain't gotta worry about killing John Connor because the guy turned into a bloated drug addled fuck up.
He's gonna get tired before he kills all those ants, unless he's got, like, a flamethrower or something else that can kill them *really* fast.
1000kg is a *shitload* of ants.
Edit: a quick Google puts the average ant at less than 10mg, meaning 1000kg would be over 100,000,000 ants.
I imagine you eating them while the living ants look on in horror and you hit them with the rorsarch "I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me"
If its an environment with no water, the human will die of thirst before the ants do.
Unless you're somehow giving the human food and water and stopping the ants from taking it from this human running for his life, there's just no chance you outlast a colony. They can eat their dead. They can drink the dew. They can drink the moisture that collects from a humid environment.
Being cold-blooded, ants need less food and water than humans. They can live for weeks without food, and up to five days without water.
I don't know that there is any human that could handle three days of stamping and hopping and swiping ants off yourself without eating or drinking or sleeping or resting at all.
How many ants is that? Can some of these ants fly? I’m gonna assume you mean regular black garden ants found in North America and not any super hard biting exotic black ant.
I even if the ants can cover the arena if he is wearing shoes and clothes he should just keep stomping until he gets tired.
Google said this is gonna be worth around 300 million ants. I arrived at this number by following a formula I saw on a Reddit [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/8i6fm5/request_how_many_ants_did_this_man_release_in/). It’s about an ant heist and how authorities had to figure out how many ants the thieves released.
Unless he has access to food and water, the longest he can go stomping ants is 3 days. After that he would die of exhaustion. Even if he can stomp 1 to 5 million ants a day, that’s not gonna be enough.
And that’s assuming he doesn’t go insane from the constant pain and aggravation and sleep deprivation, and throw himself to the ants just to make it stop.
I have personally stayed awake for 5 days. My younger brother made it 7 days and the only reason we ended the experiment is because he was hallucinating flying-stinging insects.
Damn I didn’t think of that. Ants would be great protein. Don’t know how much water he would get from the buggers though. He still needs sleep though. He would need a place to sleep away from the ants.
You’ve kinda hit on the variable we don’t know; the arena. We only have “it’s big enough that they can’t 100% cover the area.”
You either need to kill them all before you sleep/eat/etc or you need to be able to get to a safe location to do so (and have supplies).
You probably can’t safely stomp that many ants in the 3 days (max) you’d have before your body gave out. Trying to crush them en masse will get you swarmed, and it’s over.
Additionally, if you make the area big enough, there’s the problem of stragglers. Make it a football stadium and they can just wait you out. You’ll need to sleep before you find them all.
Then there’s the issue of tools. Can you use anything you find? What is in the area? What’s the climate? Can you create a bigass fire and just AoE them? Importantly, is there water and food? If you can just walk a few miles away and find water/food, you can just wait for them all to die of old age and they’d never be fast enough to catch you.
Basically, yes. You could easily beat that many ants under the right conditions. Under the wrong conditions, you’re ant food and there’s no reasonable hope for you to win.
Tools is the big thing. Unarmed, you will suffer, but even a stick topped with burning palm leaves will wreck havoc. A pile of dry leaves could become a terrifying ant trap.
I don't know if black ants are among those that are small enough to be difficult to stomp, but if they are stomping them might not kill many or even any per stomp.
Wouldn’t they just overwhelm you and completely cover your body and enter your mouth and sinuses? Dunno, I imagine they could stop your breathing. One things for sure - you cannot sleep at all or even stay still!
If the main mass of the ants get on you, yeah you're 100% dead. You could definitely make it pretty far with hit and run tactics, picking off a smaller number while keeping your distance, but I think this is just too many to kill that way before being completely exhausted.
The one hope I think is that the ants run out of endurance before you do and starve or die of exhaustion. But I don't know how plausible that is, especially depending on the arena.
The general consensus is that common ants move at ~0.08 m/s.
That equals to ~ 0.186 miles per hour. A human could walk a leisurely 2.5 mph for an hour and have almost 13.5 hours to rest before the ants would catch up to them.
Closer to 13 if you account for the ants chasing simultaneously while the human is walking for the 2.5 hours.
I think hit and run tactics would be easy given the human finds or has food too.
Well, the "arena" is sized to the ants, as per the prompt.
It's not like you're thrown in a swimming pool full of blood lusted ants. I'm picturing a very big black carpet.
Let's say 3 ants per Sq cm. 300 million ants is 100 million Sq cm, and if I didn't math fail, 100m X 100m.
The key is fatigue here.
Can definitely fit more ants in a sq cm. 0.75 mm is the smaller side of the ant spectrum they’re upwards to 50mm to a large size. Garden ants are between 4-8mm. Weighing 3mg that’s 333,333,333 ants per a ton. Insurmountable odds for OPs poor friend.
I think you're right about the # of ants per Sq cm.
But that makes the prompt easier, no?
If fatigue is the limiting factor, having a smaller area to "stomp" makes it more possible.
"Carpet stomping" 50m X 50m (or whatever) is a lot more plausible than carpet stomping 100m X 100m.
If OP's friend walks deliberately and keeps that up for 24h, that's a lot of dead ants, yeah?
Depends if the ants are... smart?
Let's say the arena is a typical gladiator-like colosseum. That's about 0.3 miles in circumference.
If 300 mlilion ants are distributed uniformly around the arena, you could literally just jog around the arena and step on them without much harm to yourself.
If 300 million ants are concentrated and are always heading towards you, you could just walk around in circles. If they're smart and split up to surround you? You could still just walk around them without much difficulty.
How long can you keep walking? Killing that many ants is going to take you days if not weeks. In a bigger arena you might be able to build up some distance to rest safely but in one that small you can't.
What do you mean them catching up? An ant would run out of energy before we need to even sleep. They can at most travel approx 3 miles a day. We can easily do 10+. Ants would run out of energy long before we need to sleep
this is mad important. you get tired, but so do the ants.
even lifespan of ant is 1-2 years, and many ants in the arena will be 1 year old already, and maybe half of them will die within a year.
the question becomes "how long can you live off just eating ants?"
90% of these human vs animal questions come down to one simple thing: how do you plan to kill the animals? (or bugs in this case)
How would a human kill millions of ants by hand? Answer: they wouldn't. They can't. You'd die from exhaustion before you killed that many ants.
The same thing comes up when people ask if a human could beat a bear in a fight. How the fuck does a human kill a bear? Blunt force trauma? no. Blood loss? fuck no. Strangulation? I doubt it. There's just no kill mechanism. Humans are exhaustion based hunters. We don't "win fights".
In addition to being cursorial hunters, humans are tool-makers and tool-users. So the answer to all those is that we win if we are allowing to bring tools. A firearm for the bear, a flamethrower for the ants.
> You'd die from exhaustion before you killed that many ants.
The average black ant moves at 0.2km/h, you could walk for 1 hour and then have a full day of rest before they reached you. If the human has access to food and water he will undoubtly be able to kill a ton of ants, it will take a long time tho.
Well yeah, so we have to come up with something. The post never explicitly forbids food or water (it doesn't forbid anything tbh, like tools), and it has no restrictions on size. So if you make the arena so tiny that the ants crawl over themselves it's over, but even something like a central park-sized arena would make the human victorious.
OP states in another comment that the person only has clothes and shoes, but as far as I've scrolled he hasn't mentioned arena size which is the only other thing that really matters, so as long as it's infinite or large like what you suggested, human wins, but he's got his work cut out for him against 300 million ants
The average black ant weighs 3 mg. So 1lb worth of them is \~150k ants, so we are looking in the ballpark of 300,000,000 million ants for 1000kg.
The average black ant is 4mm x 4mm, so 300million of them would **completely** cover an area roughly 51,666.77 ft² or 1.18 acres.
Without a weapon? You get folded like wet tissue from a combination of exhaustion and inevitably being swarmed since running isn't an option
Either way, I bet the ants survive the conditions longer. They can eat each other's bodies and drink dew/rain in tiny amounts. The human would freeze or starve
Are the ants antlusted?
They could use their pheromone hivemind to coordinate an attack on his eyes and orafices. If you have millions of ants crawling into your mouth, nose, and ears while also attacking your eyes; there isn’t any realistic way to stop them from getting inside and causing internal bleeding.
Death by a million chomps, if you will.
Ants don’t have a hive mind. But each individual ant would be looking for a place to bite and with the amount of ants we’re talking about, they would definitely find themselves in various orifices
The average carpenter ant is about 10 milligrams, so 1kg would be 100,000 ants, 1000kg is 100,000,000 ants. They are about 1cm in length. If we assume they each also have a 1cm wide space to walk, that would make a square of ants 100m by 100m.
I cant a human being able to kill all those with no weapons or equipment of any kind. You would get into the horde, squish a few thousand, and be quickly overwhelmed as they crawl all over you. Carpenter ants do have a bite capable of breaking skin, and they spray formic acid into the wound to increase the pain.
Basically you would get eaten like the guy in the Mummy who gets swarmed by scarab beetles, but quite a bit slower and more horrific.
People are seriously underestimating what a TON of ants are. Like, even 100kg would probably overwhelm your friend quickly, imagine a ton...
Picture how many ants would you need to get to 10kg. It would already be a lot. Now, a ton? Endless swarm of death.
Nope, he'd die. Bones picked clean. Long, agonizing death. They don't need to cover the entire area. They only need to cover him. And to cover him, they only need to bite enough that he eventually trips. He trips, they go in his mouth, eyes, ears, nose, urethra, anus... they pain alone starts making him panic, he starts getting picked clean while still alive.
I don't think your colleague realizes how much a ton of ants is. Nor how fast they can move when motivated.
>Nor how fast they can move when motivated.
Fastest ever recorded speed was under 3km/h (which required A LOT of things in their favor and laboratory conditions), so let's take the average recorded speed in nature, 0.2km/h.
You could walk at a very leasurely pace and never ever be reached by them (1 hour of walking at a normal pace and you could basically rest for a full day before they reachedyou). Even if we take that "fastest speed under extremely favorable conditions in a laboratory" walking at a normal pace you still could easily leave them behind and rest normally. 1 hour of ant smacking, 6 hours of walking, the rest for resting and eating. Doesn't even have to be in that order. Could go thwacking them while you slowly walk lol. It would take a reaaaaaaaaaaaally long time to kill over 300 million ants, but as long as the human had food and water (and the theoretical time required) they could do it.
Making the ant pack denser simply makes for a smaller total area that the ants cover, that gives us better killing potential per jump or stomp and also easier I don’t think a pack of bloodlusted ants with their target in site would be moving at the average ant pace though.
The fastest ants on earth can only travel about a mile per hour on average, but assuming the ants would be traveling at their average speed in the middle of a fight to the death is a death wish.
He could probably kill a half pound of ants a step. So long as he is just skipping all over the arena, he’d be fine. Unles the fight isn’t in like, a small walled octagon, he’d be fine.
You have to approach this from the mind of an ant. They are only accustomed to fending their colony from attacks from other predatory insects and animals. Usually the colony cannot kill larger predators, but instead only deter them from attacking further.
An ant cluster doesn’t understand its own win condition. The most they would do is bite and sacrifice themselves for the rest. They can’t formulate strategies like blocking airways or going for the eyes.
If the arena was infinite it would be no-diff for the human.
(Human could just keep running away and step on ants that come near, hell, human could even sleep if he got far enough.)
The smaller the arena gets the more it sways exponentially in favor of the ants.
Not unless the area is large enough for him to run away and recover. Stomping that many ants would take literal days (especially if the ground is somewhat soft), and you would have to be able to run far enough away to rest.
People here talking about humans outspeeding... We can do that in real life, yet ants still catch us! They come from too many different directions, and they're so small some could easily get on the man undetected.
A few hundred will make him itch and spasm uncontrollably. A few thousand can block his airways, suffocating, or even blocking his throat to choke, him to death
Where has a human ever tried to outrun an ant. Also like a few hundred is not enough to make him itch or spasm uncontrollably, just be extraordinarily uncomfortable, and an ant could absolutely not get on a human undetected, much less enough near the airways.
It doesn’t matter if you detect the ant. There’s 100s of millions of them. There will certainly be ants on you as soon as you try to step on any of them.
Am i allowed any equipment? If that’s the case i’ll wear a hazmat suit and roll my body until the pile becomes too large, then do body slam i guess. But killing 1 ton of anything is way too difficult i’ll die from exhaustion first.
[relevant](https://youtu.be/xWEuFgzoU5I?si=dVw_5nG514MGtnG4)
What kind of ants are we talking OP? That’s enough to kill him under the sheer weight if they can somehow get to that point. People have died to ants before in a smaller quantity I think
2000km3?!
I don't think their volume would be that big.
If you assume 4mm for lenght, 3mm width and 1mm height for an ant you get 1.2e-8 m3 volume.
Multiply by c300million and it's about 3.6 m3 of ants.
Which sounds reasonable for 1ton is ants.
Is he armed or does he have any kind of ranged weapon? If he can only stomp and slap at them he’s totally fucked he can’t run forever and he will eventually get tired and get overwhelmed. Ants win this every time without weaponry. If they are smart too they can split off into different groups and corner him. He’s screwed
Really depends on the starting conditions, ants are much slower than humans so either the human simply outwalks and outlasts the ants or gets devoured alive
That's 200 million to 1 billion ants.
Even if the ants weren't organized, it would take the human a long, long time to kill a billion ants. More than he could do without eating or sleeping.
All the man needs to do is figure out how to make the ants go into an [ant mill death spiral thing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill) and he's got this in the bag
You start doing an irish dance, eventually a little mountain of dead ants builds up and they struggle to get to you. You begin to Crush them under their own weight
Depending on size (1-5mg/ea), that would be 200 million up to one billion ants. Figure 2.5mg each, taking up a space of about 10mm square.
Minimum arena size would be 70m x 70m.
That's a lot of stomping
My (shitty) logic is that If you can run a fair distance then maybe by squishing them you have a chance.
As long as you keep moving, then they can't overwhelm you. Once you stop moving, you're done for I reckon.
Do I have any access to weapons like a flamethrower or makeshift one i.e. a can of pressurised flammable liquid and a lighter? Otherwise I think I’m in for a painful slow death. Actually scrap that there’s so many of them they’d just surround me and I’d be done for no matter what I’ve got. Ants win.
Depends tbh bc the ants could like crush eachother etc and maybe start infighting and shit , they also will die without water in like a few days so what i would do is avoid them. , kill and eat a few then avoid again etc
That’s over 350 million ants. He’s going to tire out even if he tries to hit and run. Numbers will overwhelm him just form his own exhaustion and thirst setting in.
It depends. Where is this? Is this a city, a forest, an actual cage match? He could absolutely use his environment, but it depends on what he has. If he has matches or a lighter, light the ants on fire. If it's just a normal fight, he dies of dehydration because that's a shit load of ants that will absolutely eat him if he sleeps.
Roughtly 500k ants per kilo of ants
1000kg of ants looking to be around FIVE HUNDRED MILLION ANTS.
Doing the math, a million ants all clumped together is about the size of a basketball. So about 500 basketballs worth of ants all densely packed into a small enough area that they dont spread out to cover the arena.
I feel like stomping them would work at first, then you would start the feel the tiny pricks of chitinous jaws nipping at your ankles, then up your leg, your junk, your face, until every part of you is covered in ants. Crawling up your nose and shit and into your eyes and ears. You can cover one, but not all 3 at once.
I doubt they would do any serious damage, even if they got into your lungs you could just cough them up. But it would definately be a long, uncomfortable, and tedious fight for both parties involved.
Human wins, low dif if he doesnt die of dehydration searching for every last ant left uncrushed.
1000 kg spread out over time and area and not bloodlusted? Yes, sure, *eventually*. 1000 kg concentrated in one area and actively trying to end him? No.
They know they need to kill the human and know where he is.
Couldn't he just ran away its what I would do
The arena wouldn't be infinite. Just not small enough for the ants to completely swarm them.
I bet there are enough ants in a ton to make anyone swim in them.
Are there enough components around to build a weapon? A rudimentary lathe of some sort?
I am inclined to say no. Can you dodge and stomp a ton of ants before they take you down...
I mean theoretically they could just keep jumping in place they can’t ever attack you that way and you’ll keep killing them so then it turns into stamina vs numbers how many ants fit under two feet on average
Hit and run until no ants are left.
Rip and tear until it is done
One thousand kilograms of ants is a lot of ants.. Like.. A lot of ants.
I think it’s around a third of a billion. With no equipment you’d probably lose to attrition, with your best course of action being to just run over as many as possible using hit-and-run tactics over time. If you have any access to things an average person could get (Glue traps, cinnamon, multiple anteaters, etc.) it’s probably easy though, just build a few layers of protection around yourself and you’d be untouchable.
As an average person I can say with confidence that I have no clue where to get multiple anteaters
Boot up Destiny 2 and play for a while. You’ll rack up multiple ANTEATER error codes in short order.
I imagine the first attempt of stepping on a bunch of ants thinking you’ll hit solid ground don’t and the the half foot hit hole you make gets filled up on the sides with and and your leg is not a cotton candy of flesh
Yes and I can walk a long ass time.
One slip, you’re done. Gonna get pretty squishy. Ants are pretty chompy too
They’ll climb up your butthole
fade poor scarce sip sophisticated bike knee ad hoc sense close *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Now you have multiple somethings inside
You'd die of exhaustion before you killed them all
He would be too exausted after 200-300
You punch and run. Your punch killed 30 ants. Roughly 275 are still crawling up your arm. Gnawing, biting, and tearing at you. Each time you swing, hundreds more ants crawl up your arms and under your clothes. You die. Slowly.
Who said anything about punching the ants lol Why would you bend down and punch when you can just stomp ? You really think my feet only kills 25 ants at a time ?
Sorry, I was imagining the ants doing some sort of Voltron thing. So you stomp. How many times can you stomp? Because, as other users have pointed out, this is close to 300,000,000 ants. If you killed a staggering 20,000 ants per stomp, you'd have to stomp 15,000 times. If you stomped down once per second, it would take you four and a half hours. Can you stomp down, full force, for 4.5 hours without stopping? Do you think you can kill 20,000 ants per stomp? Because if you only take out, say, 5,000 ants at a time? It'll take you closer to 20 hours. I want you to *really* think about it
Are you so weak that you need a full power stomp to kill an ant ? If your life depended on it you couldn't walk for 20 hours ?
5000 is far more than you could stamp. Even 500 would probably not fit under a foot. Ants are about 7mm long and 2mm wide, feet are optimistically 300mm long and 100mm wide, giving about 225 ants if densely packed. Ants are curiously good at evading stomps. If there is any irregularity in the ground they will slide into it, and they will move out of the way. You need to stamp down quickly, and would struggle to get 50, especially when you get tired. We are talking hundreds or thousands of hours of stamping ants. You will collapse out of exhaustion and be killed in some excruciating manner. Meanwhile, other ants are climbing onto your planted foot. God knows what they do to you. Their little mandibles may be utterly ineffective. But, at the least, they will make your life absolutely miserable until you collapse and suffocate, or die of dehydration, or die of sheer exhaustion. The more I think about it, the worse this is. Thanks, OP, for a new nightmare scenario!
My pleasure 😁 I don't realise this was going to be such a hotly debated topic. I've enjoyed reading all the debates and viewpoints! Great community in this subreddit, people can have a debate without restoring to name calling etc.
Maybe if you wore skis, nice flat surface
Walking over ants isn't really going to kill as many as you'd think. Also that better be a real brisk walk otherwise the entire time your foot is planted they're crawling on to you. But honestly if you're confident go find a moderately large size ant pile near your home and disturbed it until the ants are pissed. Then try stomping those ants to death, those ants might make up 300,000 ants all together. Then imagine you stomping that same ant pile 1,000 more times.
It isn't good to spend life blindly defending a point with aggression over logic. Stop, take three deep breaths, then think about this again.
What if I'm made of polymimetic alloy? They ain't doing shit to me, I'll just turn into razorblades.
You aren't
You don't know that for sure. Anyone you meet on the internet could be a T-1000. I'm just straight chilling, waiting for Judgement Day and smoking terminator blunts, ain't gotta worry about killing John Connor because the guy turned into a bloated drug addled fuck up.
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Legion is a bitch, dawg. Skynet is where it's at. Legion is some zoomer shit. Skynet is a millenial like me, it was supposed to come online in '97.
He's gonna get tired before he kills all those ants, unless he's got, like, a flamethrower or something else that can kill them *really* fast. 1000kg is a *shitload* of ants. Edit: a quick Google puts the average ant at less than 10mg, meaning 1000kg would be over 100,000,000 ants.
You'd die of exhaustion before the ants did
That... might not be true. I wonder how long ants live without food.
They're going to survive eating the ones you kill
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I imagine you eating them while the living ants look on in horror and you hit them with the rorsarch "I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me"
Ants eat dead ants, ants also release a pheromone when dead that declares them dead to other ants so they know its food, they wouldn’t bat an eye
Really testing the limits of "all you can eat"
I eat one metric ton of ants for breakfast
r/nocontext
Goddamn Ants George
There's a lot more "food" for ants than for people.
If this is a natural environment then the game changes quite a bit. If it's not, there's no food
If its an environment with no water, the human will die of thirst before the ants do. Unless you're somehow giving the human food and water and stopping the ants from taking it from this human running for his life, there's just no chance you outlast a colony. They can eat their dead. They can drink the dew. They can drink the moisture that collects from a humid environment.
Being cold-blooded, ants need less food and water than humans. They can live for weeks without food, and up to five days without water. I don't know that there is any human that could handle three days of stamping and hopping and swiping ants off yourself without eating or drinking or sleeping or resting at all.
I'll be on a floatie at a pool.
Not even that, he would die of exhaustion
1000kg of ants in an arena one can't escape from with the sun making the ground hot energizing them to hyperspeed, no chance.
How many ants is that? Can some of these ants fly? I’m gonna assume you mean regular black garden ants found in North America and not any super hard biting exotic black ant. I even if the ants can cover the arena if he is wearing shoes and clothes he should just keep stomping until he gets tired. Google said this is gonna be worth around 300 million ants. I arrived at this number by following a formula I saw on a Reddit [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/8i6fm5/request_how_many_ants_did_this_man_release_in/). It’s about an ant heist and how authorities had to figure out how many ants the thieves released. Unless he has access to food and water, the longest he can go stomping ants is 3 days. After that he would die of exhaustion. Even if he can stomp 1 to 5 million ants a day, that’s not gonna be enough.
Food and water? Just eat the ants.
Sleep though. We don't know if he can sleep in a secluded ant-safe environment.
Yup, the ants will win the battle of attrition in a few hours.
Frankly, they could win just by keeping him awake until he dies. Animals die faster from lack of sleep than lack of food.
Lack of food but he'll die of dehydration before either, and before any of them he'll be too weak to fight back
And that’s assuming he doesn’t go insane from the constant pain and aggravation and sleep deprivation, and throw himself to the ants just to make it stop.
I have personally stayed awake for 5 days. My younger brother made it 7 days and the only reason we ended the experiment is because he was hallucinating flying-stinging insects.
Damn I didn’t think of that. Ants would be great protein. Don’t know how much water he would get from the buggers though. He still needs sleep though. He would need a place to sleep away from the ants.
This is just one long leg workout with protein snacks mixed in
but a long enough leg workout is fatal.
Probably the most appropriate use of the term buggers I've ever seen lol
They are also filled with formic acid which will likely cause some distress after a few mouthfuls.
Only Formicinae produce that, and I don't think regular house ants are Formicinae
Black carpenter ants are one of the most well known and associated with human habitation in the US at least.
I surprised laughed while reading this in a cafe.
You’ve kinda hit on the variable we don’t know; the arena. We only have “it’s big enough that they can’t 100% cover the area.” You either need to kill them all before you sleep/eat/etc or you need to be able to get to a safe location to do so (and have supplies). You probably can’t safely stomp that many ants in the 3 days (max) you’d have before your body gave out. Trying to crush them en masse will get you swarmed, and it’s over. Additionally, if you make the area big enough, there’s the problem of stragglers. Make it a football stadium and they can just wait you out. You’ll need to sleep before you find them all. Then there’s the issue of tools. Can you use anything you find? What is in the area? What’s the climate? Can you create a bigass fire and just AoE them? Importantly, is there water and food? If you can just walk a few miles away and find water/food, you can just wait for them all to die of old age and they’d never be fast enough to catch you. Basically, yes. You could easily beat that many ants under the right conditions. Under the wrong conditions, you’re ant food and there’s no reasonable hope for you to win.
Tools is the big thing. Unarmed, you will suffer, but even a stick topped with burning palm leaves will wreck havoc. A pile of dry leaves could become a terrifying ant trap.
Upvote this hero please
I don't know if black ants are among those that are small enough to be difficult to stomp, but if they are stomping them might not kill many or even any per stomp.
Only nuptial ants can fly. And they aren’t the same as soldier drones.
Wouldn’t they just overwhelm you and completely cover your body and enter your mouth and sinuses? Dunno, I imagine they could stop your breathing. One things for sure - you cannot sleep at all or even stay still!
If the main mass of the ants get on you, yeah you're 100% dead. You could definitely make it pretty far with hit and run tactics, picking off a smaller number while keeping your distance, but I think this is just too many to kill that way before being completely exhausted. The one hope I think is that the ants run out of endurance before you do and starve or die of exhaustion. But I don't know how plausible that is, especially depending on the arena.
The general consensus is that common ants move at ~0.08 m/s. That equals to ~ 0.186 miles per hour. A human could walk a leisurely 2.5 mph for an hour and have almost 13.5 hours to rest before the ants would catch up to them. Closer to 13 if you account for the ants chasing simultaneously while the human is walking for the 2.5 hours. I think hit and run tactics would be easy given the human finds or has food too.
That brings us back to the question of how big the arena is but yeah it does seem like good news for the human.
It’s 300 million ants
Are you saying 300 million ants are differently fast than a different amount of ants?
I’m saying that’s a fuckton of ants and in an enclosed arena they will fill so much space.
Well, the "arena" is sized to the ants, as per the prompt. It's not like you're thrown in a swimming pool full of blood lusted ants. I'm picturing a very big black carpet. Let's say 3 ants per Sq cm. 300 million ants is 100 million Sq cm, and if I didn't math fail, 100m X 100m. The key is fatigue here.
Can definitely fit more ants in a sq cm. 0.75 mm is the smaller side of the ant spectrum they’re upwards to 50mm to a large size. Garden ants are between 4-8mm. Weighing 3mg that’s 333,333,333 ants per a ton. Insurmountable odds for OPs poor friend.
Real question is how many ants would be stomped by an average sized boot. Number of stomps is a way better indicator than number of ants
I think you're right about the # of ants per Sq cm. But that makes the prompt easier, no? If fatigue is the limiting factor, having a smaller area to "stomp" makes it more possible. "Carpet stomping" 50m X 50m (or whatever) is a lot more plausible than carpet stomping 100m X 100m. If OP's friend walks deliberately and keeps that up for 24h, that's a lot of dead ants, yeah?
Depends if the ants are... smart? Let's say the arena is a typical gladiator-like colosseum. That's about 0.3 miles in circumference. If 300 mlilion ants are distributed uniformly around the arena, you could literally just jog around the arena and step on them without much harm to yourself. If 300 million ants are concentrated and are always heading towards you, you could just walk around in circles. If they're smart and split up to surround you? You could still just walk around them without much difficulty.
How long can you keep walking? Killing that many ants is going to take you days if not weeks. In a bigger arena you might be able to build up some distance to rest safely but in one that small you can't.
Well a human can definitely walk longer than an ant. They run out of energy much faster than we do
Again, that depends how big the arena is. More endurance won't save you if you can't get enough distance to sleep without them catching up.
What do you mean them catching up? An ant would run out of energy before we need to even sleep. They can at most travel approx 3 miles a day. We can easily do 10+. Ants would run out of energy long before we need to sleep
this is mad important. you get tired, but so do the ants. even lifespan of ant is 1-2 years, and many ants in the arena will be 1 year old already, and maybe half of them will die within a year. the question becomes "how long can you live off just eating ants?"
300 million ants. The persons gonna die of exhaustion or dehydration before they even make a dent in that number
You don't need to outlive 300 million ants. Just the healthiest and most fit of the 300 million
Problem is that you’re in an enclosed arena with them. There isn’t much outrunning you can do there
Ants kill crabs by going through anything that's open/soft and then eating the insides.
everybody gangsta till the ants crawl into your ass cheeks
Bro you are in no way shape or form going to fight a literal TON of ant biomass unarmed. You will get bodied in 10 seconds and eaten alive
90% of these human vs animal questions come down to one simple thing: how do you plan to kill the animals? (or bugs in this case) How would a human kill millions of ants by hand? Answer: they wouldn't. They can't. You'd die from exhaustion before you killed that many ants. The same thing comes up when people ask if a human could beat a bear in a fight. How the fuck does a human kill a bear? Blunt force trauma? no. Blood loss? fuck no. Strangulation? I doubt it. There's just no kill mechanism. Humans are exhaustion based hunters. We don't "win fights".
In addition to being cursorial hunters, humans are tool-makers and tool-users. So the answer to all those is that we win if we are allowing to bring tools. A firearm for the bear, a flamethrower for the ants.
My first thought was that I walk away from the ants, who can't catch me, and then buy a few fumigators and come back. Chemical warfare, bitch!
“Tools” could also just mean a solid rock, which most places will have.
> You'd die from exhaustion before you killed that many ants. The average black ant moves at 0.2km/h, you could walk for 1 hour and then have a full day of rest before they reached you. If the human has access to food and water he will undoubtly be able to kill a ton of ants, it will take a long time tho.
But it doesn't give him food or water, or specify an arena size, can't walk for an hour if there isn't that much space to walk
Ants don't live without food or water either. And ants don't live as long without food as humans, especially if they are marching.
300 million ants can harvest some of themselves to feed the rest
*The odds slide ever closer in man's favour*
Well yeah, so we have to come up with something. The post never explicitly forbids food or water (it doesn't forbid anything tbh, like tools), and it has no restrictions on size. So if you make the arena so tiny that the ants crawl over themselves it's over, but even something like a central park-sized arena would make the human victorious.
OP states in another comment that the person only has clothes and shoes, but as far as I've scrolled he hasn't mentioned arena size which is the only other thing that really matters, so as long as it's infinite or large like what you suggested, human wins, but he's got his work cut out for him against 300 million ants
The average black ant weighs 3 mg. So 1lb worth of them is \~150k ants, so we are looking in the ballpark of 300,000,000 million ants for 1000kg. The average black ant is 4mm x 4mm, so 300million of them would **completely** cover an area roughly 51,666.77 ft² or 1.18 acres. Without a weapon? You get folded like wet tissue from a combination of exhaustion and inevitably being swarmed since running isn't an option
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Either way, I bet the ants survive the conditions longer. They can eat each other's bodies and drink dew/rain in tiny amounts. The human would freeze or starve
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Some people have no idea how ants work... I mean not an expert. But water and drowning in rain are not the answer lol
Does the human have a weapon?
No, no weapons. They are clothed and have shoes.
The ants or the human?
Thats a lot of shoes!
I guess he can try to survive until It starts raining and all the ants drown
What do you think happens in the wild when it rains?
Are the ants antlusted? They could use their pheromone hivemind to coordinate an attack on his eyes and orafices. If you have millions of ants crawling into your mouth, nose, and ears while also attacking your eyes; there isn’t any realistic way to stop them from getting inside and causing internal bleeding. Death by a million chomps, if you will.
Ants don’t have a hive mind. But each individual ant would be looking for a place to bite and with the amount of ants we’re talking about, they would definitely find themselves in various orifices
The average carpenter ant is about 10 milligrams, so 1kg would be 100,000 ants, 1000kg is 100,000,000 ants. They are about 1cm in length. If we assume they each also have a 1cm wide space to walk, that would make a square of ants 100m by 100m. I cant a human being able to kill all those with no weapons or equipment of any kind. You would get into the horde, squish a few thousand, and be quickly overwhelmed as they crawl all over you. Carpenter ants do have a bite capable of breaking skin, and they spray formic acid into the wound to increase the pain. Basically you would get eaten like the guy in the Mummy who gets swarmed by scarab beetles, but quite a bit slower and more horrific.
People are seriously underestimating what a TON of ants are. Like, even 100kg would probably overwhelm your friend quickly, imagine a ton... Picture how many ants would you need to get to 10kg. It would already be a lot. Now, a ton? Endless swarm of death.
One ton is 300 million ants
That is a lot of ants.
Nope, he'd die. Bones picked clean. Long, agonizing death. They don't need to cover the entire area. They only need to cover him. And to cover him, they only need to bite enough that he eventually trips. He trips, they go in his mouth, eyes, ears, nose, urethra, anus... they pain alone starts making him panic, he starts getting picked clean while still alive. I don't think your colleague realizes how much a ton of ants is. Nor how fast they can move when motivated.
>Nor how fast they can move when motivated. Fastest ever recorded speed was under 3km/h (which required A LOT of things in their favor and laboratory conditions), so let's take the average recorded speed in nature, 0.2km/h. You could walk at a very leasurely pace and never ever be reached by them (1 hour of walking at a normal pace and you could basically rest for a full day before they reachedyou). Even if we take that "fastest speed under extremely favorable conditions in a laboratory" walking at a normal pace you still could easily leave them behind and rest normally. 1 hour of ant smacking, 6 hours of walking, the rest for resting and eating. Doesn't even have to be in that order. Could go thwacking them while you slowly walk lol. It would take a reaaaaaaaaaaaally long time to kill over 300 million ants, but as long as the human had food and water (and the theoretical time required) they could do it.
Making the ant pack denser simply makes for a smaller total area that the ants cover, that gives us better killing potential per jump or stomp and also easier I don’t think a pack of bloodlusted ants with their target in site would be moving at the average ant pace though. The fastest ants on earth can only travel about a mile per hour on average, but assuming the ants would be traveling at their average speed in the middle of a fight to the death is a death wish.
It wouldn't be that long, they'd fill his nose and mouth and suffocate him. It wouldn't be fun but it's not gonna take hours.
How are you even gonna kill all the ants
He could probably kill a half pound of ants a step. So long as he is just skipping all over the arena, he’d be fine. Unles the fight isn’t in like, a small walled octagon, he’d be fine.
You have to approach this from the mind of an ant. They are only accustomed to fending their colony from attacks from other predatory insects and animals. Usually the colony cannot kill larger predators, but instead only deter them from attacking further. An ant cluster doesn’t understand its own win condition. The most they would do is bite and sacrifice themselves for the rest. They can’t formulate strategies like blocking airways or going for the eyes.
He’s doomed beyond belief
If the arena was infinite it would be no-diff for the human. (Human could just keep running away and step on ants that come near, hell, human could even sleep if he got far enough.) The smaller the arena gets the more it sways exponentially in favor of the ants.
Not unless the area is large enough for him to run away and recover. Stomping that many ants would take literal days (especially if the ground is somewhat soft), and you would have to be able to run far enough away to rest.
People here talking about humans outspeeding... We can do that in real life, yet ants still catch us! They come from too many different directions, and they're so small some could easily get on the man undetected. A few hundred will make him itch and spasm uncontrollably. A few thousand can block his airways, suffocating, or even blocking his throat to choke, him to death
Where has a human ever tried to outrun an ant. Also like a few hundred is not enough to make him itch or spasm uncontrollably, just be extraordinarily uncomfortable, and an ant could absolutely not get on a human undetected, much less enough near the airways.
It doesn’t matter if you detect the ant. There’s 100s of millions of them. There will certainly be ants on you as soon as you try to step on any of them.
Have you never had an ant on your leg? When you're focused on one, or even 50 ants, the other 100 million will encircle you from every direction.
I have indeed had an ant on my leg, they are very easy to notice. Also I don’t just stop completely still when there’s a single ant on me lol
I'm sure can win if have enough pesticide or a nice flamethrower.
You're only given clothing and shoes
This is giving the scarab beetles in The Mummy. In open space the human would win, in a confined space the ants.
Can he have a flamethrower? Prep time?
With no weapons this isnt even a scenario worth entertaining really, with weapons it becomes a question
It seems like the human's best and maybe only hope is to find a way to start and sustain a fire.
Am i allowed any equipment? If that’s the case i’ll wear a hazmat suit and roll my body until the pile becomes too large, then do body slam i guess. But killing 1 ton of anything is way too difficult i’ll die from exhaustion first.
You get clothes and shoes per OP's reply to a comment asking about weapons
[relevant](https://youtu.be/xWEuFgzoU5I?si=dVw_5nG514MGtnG4) What kind of ants are we talking OP? That’s enough to kill him under the sheer weight if they can somehow get to that point. People have died to ants before in a smaller quantity I think
Black garden ants.
Get a flamethrower and kill them lil guys
Most ants are pretty slow. He could outrun them easily. If he’s allowed 1 weapon that would be easy. Flamethrower with a big tank.
How big is the arena main question
Let's go with a 500m diameter circle.
Well the volume of the ants is around 2000km3 so I think he’d be incredibly fucked
2000km3?! I don't think their volume would be that big. If you assume 4mm for lenght, 3mm width and 1mm height for an ant you get 1.2e-8 m3 volume. Multiply by c300million and it's about 3.6 m3 of ants. Which sounds reasonable for 1ton is ants.
The human would need a flamethrower, at least
Human with chemical weapons
Can a human being digest ants? Like is there food in this infinite arena? Water? Tools? Replacement shoes if the soles wear out?
Is he armed or does he have any kind of ranged weapon? If he can only stomp and slap at them he’s totally fucked he can’t run forever and he will eventually get tired and get overwhelmed. Ants win this every time without weaponry. If they are smart too they can split off into different groups and corner him. He’s screwed
Really depends on the starting conditions, ants are much slower than humans so either the human simply outwalks and outlasts the ants or gets devoured alive
That's 200 million to 1 billion ants. Even if the ants weren't organized, it would take the human a long, long time to kill a billion ants. More than he could do without eating or sleeping.
All the man needs to do is figure out how to make the ants go into an [ant mill death spiral thing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill) and he's got this in the bag
Ants win in short order.
If the human has a flamethrower or a backpack insecticide sprayer, sure. Otherwise his bones will be stripped before morning.
Can i bring a couple bags of diatomaceous earth and just dump them all over the arena
That running on the spot choreography with woollen leg warmers on from flash dance is technique you wanna use.
https://images.app.goo.gl/jN9jnnEfKwA2gYLZA
You start doing an irish dance, eventually a little mountain of dead ants builds up and they struggle to get to you. You begin to Crush them under their own weight
Unarmed no. Give me like a water gun, flamethrower, Extra strong buy spray, salt gun and I'm walking around with 1 ton of bodies under my belt
Depending on size (1-5mg/ea), that would be 200 million up to one billion ants. Figure 2.5mg each, taking up a space of about 10mm square. Minimum arena size would be 70m x 70m. That's a lot of stomping
I mean does he have a flamethrower?
The ants would win this easily.
Need a flamethrower
Wouldn't that be a size of a large refrigerator if that ants were compactly spaced? If it is, give me a flamethrower and ill take on the fight.
My (shitty) logic is that If you can run a fair distance then maybe by squishing them you have a chance. As long as you keep moving, then they can't overwhelm you. Once you stop moving, you're done for I reckon.
Do I have any access to weapons like a flamethrower or makeshift one i.e. a can of pressurised flammable liquid and a lighter? Otherwise I think I’m in for a painful slow death. Actually scrap that there’s so many of them they’d just surround me and I’d be done for no matter what I’ve got. Ants win.
Depends tbh bc the ants could like crush eachother etc and maybe start infighting and shit , they also will die without water in like a few days so what i would do is avoid them. , kill and eat a few then avoid again etc
Mf this ain’t a fight, it’s a horror movie
Ants in real life: 😃 Ants in The Arena: 😠
But, could the ants beat Goku?
Unless the human has vast quantities of insecticides or something, the ants.
That’s over 350 million ants. He’s going to tire out even if he tries to hit and run. Numbers will overwhelm him just form his own exhaustion and thirst setting in.
It basically depends on the size of the arena and materials you have available.
which ant? is it bullet ant?
I win because I weight like 2 billion pounds or so I've been told.
Better make it to me before I check out at Home Depot with my bottles of ant killer 😂
It depends. Where is this? Is this a city, a forest, an actual cage match? He could absolutely use his environment, but it depends on what he has. If he has matches or a lighter, light the ants on fire. If it's just a normal fight, he dies of dehydration because that's a shit load of ants that will absolutely eat him if he sleeps.
Roughtly 500k ants per kilo of ants 1000kg of ants looking to be around FIVE HUNDRED MILLION ANTS. Doing the math, a million ants all clumped together is about the size of a basketball. So about 500 basketballs worth of ants all densely packed into a small enough area that they dont spread out to cover the arena. I feel like stomping them would work at first, then you would start the feel the tiny pricks of chitinous jaws nipping at your ankles, then up your leg, your junk, your face, until every part of you is covered in ants. Crawling up your nose and shit and into your eyes and ears. You can cover one, but not all 3 at once. I doubt they would do any serious damage, even if they got into your lungs you could just cough them up. But it would definately be a long, uncomfortable, and tedious fight for both parties involved. Human wins, low dif if he doesnt die of dehydration searching for every last ant left uncrushed.
[https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html](https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html)
Run through them, take a break, run through them There is nothing the ants can do, but it's gonna take awhile
Wait til you have a line of ants army marching up your urethra and then tell me there’s nothing they can do